Is -ium the new suffix to describe the open source project of commercial products?

No, the name was chosen because the heart of the application is the Chromium Extension Framework, or CEF. Choosing Desurium as the name of the open source project was a way of giving credit to the CEF project.

some would argue that no one games anymore, period because modern 'games' are really little more interactive movies designed to create 'wow' moments as backdrops to social communication (audio chat mostly).

I think for me, gaming in the retro-ages were a bit more exciting since well, the social aspect is much different than it is today. For instance, I have fonder memories of playing games at the arcade or on the home console, in person with the other players. As in, we weren't playing with anonymous people we didn't know. We also had a certain code of conduct of how you acted when playing with friends or even people you didn't know at the arcade. You would show good sportsmanship (most of the time), something

The major change I have seen is that games have gone from focusing on physical technique or strategy to focusing on the story. I place games like half life, mass effect, and homeworld on the same level as my favorite books or movies when it comes to an ability to move me emotionally.

While I remember older arcade games from my childhood fondly, they lacked the narrative depth of more modern games, and were basically a challenging distraction. I sometimes wonder if the video game will become the 21st century's most distinctive art form.

Seiken Densetsu 2 (also known as Secret of Mana) came out 2 years before Chronotrigger... and there were games in the Final Fantasy series that did a really good job of that before the Seiken Densetsu series was even imagined. Dragon warrior, too. There were games on 8-bit Nintendo that had both good story line, and fun gameplay, and I'm pretty sure that if you went digging for them, you could find games that did a pretty good job on even older systems...

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was an open ended role playing game designed with an "ethically-nuanced, story-driven approach", and it came out in 1985 for the Apple II.
The objective of the game is to lead a virtuous life, and become the spiritual leader of the world of Britannia.

Yeah there are monsters and stuff, but all of the quests are ethical dilemmas and you get points for doing things like helping the poor...

Don't forget the Phantasy Star games on the sega, those had some pretty long engaging stories that had plenty of twists. As for as the switch from twitch gaming to today i think the key is finding the right balance between challenging and fun. take a game like ArmA for instance, sure its realistic as hell, but how many are gonna have fun crawling through the grass for 40 plus minutes to get to a position you can fire from that the enemy won't drill you a new asshole? Sure its realistic but that might be a l

Then you have an extremely limited knowledge of games, and I pity you. Chrono Trigger came out in 1995. There was a entire decade of story-based games before it-- including gems like Another World, Prince of Persia (and its sequel), most of the Lucas Arts games...

I'd love to see some definition of what made classic games more 'game' than things like Battlefield, Portal or Minecraft.

Well that's simple. Elitism and snobbery!

To those people, the definition of a game is pretty straight forward:"If I don't like it, then it is not a game at all""If I do like it, and so do others, it is a pop game""If I do like it, and others don't even know it exists, then it is a true game"

Seems to fit perfectly with the GP comment too.

Of course the true definition of a game is "Something you do to have fun or compete at"But don't let the game snobs hear you say it, you might get mauled;}

Portal and Minecraft are very old-school games, the very example you reply to is wrong.

What makes classic games classic? Emphasis on gameplay over anything else. Quick games you can start in less than 5 minutes without sitting through options or too much story. Yet complex enough to last a long time and relying on skill rather than invested time (except RPGs of course) (and as opposed to random, dime-a-dozen-note the emphasis, that means "not the good ones"- iOS/Android games that are extremely shallow). Mi

To those people, the definition of a game is pretty straight forward:
"If I don't like it, then it is not a game at all"
"If I do like it, and so do others, it is a pop game"
"If I do like it, and others don't even know it exists, then it is a true game"

I am what marketing calls a "harcore gamer". Honed in the days of 8 and 16 bits to today.I love games that are 2D/sprite-based, and miss many old classics, I dislike a lot of today's games, and I still play my old-time favorites, and still discover games from that time that I find excellent even after I grew old and grumpy.But man, those 3 you mention, are absolutely proper games.Minecraft is just not specially challenging, but you can find user-made maps that put gameplay as hardcore as it gets (Vechs' map

some would argue that no one games anymore, period because modern 'games' are really little more interactive movies designed to create 'wow' moments as backdrops to social communication (audio chat mostly).

Wait, so you're saying that games have evolved to the point that people are actually talking to one another? Ye gads, we can't have that! What's our society coming to?

Back in the good old days, we played all alone in our parent's basements - like gaming is supposed to be!

Riiiight, lets just tell that to Gabe at Valve together shall we? "Hey Gabe, this AC says folks don't game on PCs no more, just FYI" Gabe "Wooohoo, I'm using this solid gold slide to jump in my swimming pool of money, I'm fricking Scrooge McDuck, Woohooo"...yeah i don't think Gabe looks all that upset. Considering they added capacity like crazy for the big Xmas sale and there were still plenty of "We're sorry, we have sooo many people trying to snatch these deals up things are jammed up, please hang on" mes

Linux... It gives you linux. Steam is not on linux yet if ever. There was a time i would reboot to windows to play games. I don't anymore. So these guys do get money out of me because i can get some linux games. Steam does not. However if they where to offer a linux client and had some of their games available on linux.....

As for why OS is better? Well in this case it means linux distro devs can fix bugs and keep it working if they care enough.

Im guessing that they do want to support Linux as a platform but the maintenance of the thing is killing them. Linux gamers exist but for the small numbers they provide I but the upkeep of the client is killing them time wise. Open sourcing the client makes sense if this is the case, otherwise why bother?

Distro maintainers and experienced users do often think of closed source not only as a security risk, but also as a maintenance nightmare. If Desura is open sourced and reasonably easy to compile, it WILL make it into many distro repositories.

That and the potential to attract some useful contributions from game modders etc. sounds like the most likely motivation to me, really.

Im guessing that they do want to support Linux as a platform but the maintenance of the thing is killing them. Linux gamers exist but for the small numbers they provide I but the upkeep of the client is killing them time wise. Open sourcing the client makes sense if this is the case, otherwise why bother?

...except that they released their Windows client under GPLv3 as well?

With only a single developer being employed at the company for the native GNU+Linux port, of course the arguement can be made that they did a cost-benefit analysis and determined that crowd-sourcing development talent and time from the Internet would yield a superior product that improves faster. This is not a testament to small numbers of GNU+Linux users, but rather the efficiency of modern Free Software development methodologies. The fact that they GPLv3-ed their Windows client is further proof of this fact.

Never got around to buying a HD tv and a 600 dollar (for the longest time) console

BUT, I just dont like download games

I have a sucky internet connection (comcast economy) , its far more convenient for me to go 5 min down the road and get a disc from walmart, I do have a few games, but shit like now I just reformatted my machine yesterday, and those few games are going to take quite a few all night sessions to download... again, for the 4th time since I purchased them, just so I wont hog up the internet con

you can backup local game files in steam either manually or using their own backup function.

steam is incredibly well built in this regard, you can even throw _some_ game files into the corresponding directory, and steam will recognize them and skip them for download...

for example, i installed steam on wine on a linux partition, and then copied game files manually from a windows installation in the same box, and voila, steam did not complain about anything, and all games worked fine.

yea but by the time I download it, archive it, use my discs.... is it really any less effort than driving to walmart and getting a boxed copy on a stamped disk?

Opening up Windows explorer, navigating to the steamapps folder then dragging the copied folder of the game I want to re-install from my NAS into the steamapps folder over gigabit ethernet is exactly how more effort than driving somewhere, buying something and installing that from several discs?

But really, no one gives a fuck about indie gaming...they say they do for geek cred, but the majority run out and buy the newest "call of the battlefield of resistance honor" when it comes out. No one really wants puzzle clones designed by some well meaning aspie dude living in his grandma's basement. They want games with REAL art, that that will require a team, perhaps a small team, but the days when 1 guy in a garage could effectively compet

What you say is true but I for one do not buy new games because they cost too much. I do buy indie games when they are very good, which is more about working correctly without me having to dick with anything than about the nice art. On the other hand, I won't pay for something like minecraft because it's too conceptually simple. If more people would work on minetest we wouldn't need minecraft:)

600? Really? I know your trying to make a point but making up shit just makes you sound dumb. Its been 4 or more years since the highest end ps3 was 600, and youve been able to get an xbox for under 200 for 3 or so. If walmart is just 5 minutes away you should know this.

Or anything else, other than a surrender of a right, and a public sharing of it.
A bit testimonial sounding here, so I apologize, but this is a doorway to getting game developers to start taking linux seriously. I just started using the Desura client and found that it runs faster on Ubuntu than on Windows. Just sayin'. Installing and purchasing are painless too. If you game, I wish you'd help promote it. Take it seriously and try not to be so flippant and judgemental.
I'm going back to porting one of my projects to SDL now.

1$ = 1€ has been standard for everything electronics and software, ever since the dollar became weak. Be glad you're not living in the UK where it is 1$ = 1£. I don't like it either, but non Dollar users are second class world citizens.

What the Desura client concerns: first thing to fix is that it gets installed multi-user in a correct way. Then it's up to the Distro maintainers to package it correctly and put it in their reporitories.

Prices expressed in € generally include VAT. Prices expressed in $ generally do not; sales tax is either added as a line item (for sales in person or mail order sales within one state) or payable to the state government at the end of the year (for interstate mail order sales).

Yah, it was. I was a bit distracted when writing that, so I apologize. I only meant by "run faster" that it feels way snappier than on other platforms I had tried it on, which matters to me because I hate bad UIs. I deal with enough of those at work.

As a Linux user, it's become pretty hard for me to take Linux gaming seriously since Nvidia launched Optimus and left us Linux users out in the cold. I just bought a new laptop with an Nvidia card and I had no idea what I was getting myself into: even simple 2D games run sluggishly on my brand new $400 graphics card in Linux, because it falls back to the Intel integrated card and there appears to be no way to get the real graphics card to work without booting Windows. I've lost all respect for Nvidia, but m

?? what? I have many linux boxes here with a range of nvidia cards. They all run at about the correct speed. As in at full speed with the expected performance you would get in windows.

Of course many of the mobile cards do have low expected performance... and are not cheap either. You pay for small or power saving it seems... But then laptops are not really where high performance gaming is at regardless of OS.

But do your Nvidia cards have Optimus [wikipedia.org]? My previous laptop (bought in late 2007) had an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB, and that played games pretty well on Windows and Linux (but it was starting to get a bit old so I bought a new one). This laptop (bought in late 2011) has an Nvidia GeForce 540M 2GB, and it runs fine on Windows, abysmally on Linux. I haven't played any serious 3D games, but 2D games like Braid and Jamestown are sluggish, and I've tried my own (poorly optimised) 3D game and it runs at half th

I've never heard of this company or its games and "client" before. Can someone please explain what exactly the open sourced software does? Is it anything of value or is it simply a portal through which you fill the company's pockets, a la Valves Steam client?

I hate to sound negative about any software being open sourced, but so many companies use open sourcing as a marketing ploy or as a way to cut thier support costs, so I'm always suspicious about ones I've never heard of before.

Major differences between it and steam:
1) Major emphasis on independently produced games
2) Linux support
3) Inbuilt mod support
It is made by the same people who run indiedb.com and moddb.com. It allows the creators of mods to quickly and easily reach people, it allows developers of games that have a linux version to easily and simply target every distro (rather than just Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Software Center, for example) and it gives independent developers a quick and easy way of getting their games

Simple business decision. If the biggest cost of moving to a new platform is usability, then it would make sense to copy the competing platform to reduce the learning curve. Furthermore, hardcore gamers tend to go for the carbon, black, grey look more often than most. Personally, I've never understood why everything including the window shell has to be some form of black polished metal, but I don't use all of my free time gaming either.

I'd say this business decision is flawed. Most every gamer friend I have looks at it and thinks it's just a rip-off of steam. They dismiss it before they realize it offers a lot of interesting products steam doesn't have.

I'm not too familiar with this platform, but a quick browse of the site shows that the client supports some kind of DRM (if nothing else, their developer page [desura.com] lists "Check player authentication (are they allowed to play the game / banned)" under API Integration). Wouldn't open-sourcing the client allow anybody to produce a version that ignored any DRM checks in the client?

When you open source a game, I suppose it's your choice as the developer. But when you open source a content delivery platform, doesn't t

I don't know the details of the implementation, but I'm pretty sure that any DRM could be included as part of the game, rather than the client (which, in case you're not familiar with it, is basically just a GUI shell for purchasing, downloading and launching games).
Open-sourcing the Desura client itself would not necessarily impact any libraries that are linked into the games, even if those libraries were also provided by Desura.
Actually, even if they open-sourced the DRM library itself, the games you do

If they did open source the DRM library as you say, it would still be a risk -- presumably if you have the source code to a statically linked library, it is not too difficult to recompile a given function and then hack it into the executable. But then, all client-side DRM is susceptible to hacking, and this would make it non-trivial to do so.